Arcana

From 2013 – 2016 I took a break from engineering consulting and ran a sex shop. What that meant was that for 3 years I had the honor and the privilege of helping people navigate sex and pleasure and agency and gender and identity and orientation and experimentation and access and confession and discomfort and figuring out what it means for each of us to find our way with – or against – this current that we call ‘culture.’

I’m also a street photographer, which means that one way I process what I’m thinking is with my camera. So, along with walking, watching and thinking, I was also shooting film.

A set of circumstances in the few years before this period introduced me to the Tarot and got me thinking about the idea of archetypes and where they fit into this flow of culture too. And the question of whether we explain ourselves to ourselves from the inside out or from the outside in. And so walking back and forth to work and thinking about all this, I started shooting the deck.

Two rules –

Congress Street, Free Street, Middle Street, Exchange Street.

The image and its reverse in the same frame. Reflections count.

What do we take in through our psyche, with or without our conscious consent, about how we think about who we are?

22 images here – the Major Arcana. The archetypes of our cultural lives. And maybe you’re thinking the same thing I am – 22 archetypes. Only 22 archetypes. The Hindu pantheon, just as example, has hundreds of gods, each a manifestation of some pouring spark of the divine that is the human spirit. And here we’ve somehow allowed the European canon to reduce that shower to 22 incarnations or manifestations or labelled categories of understanding and experience. 22. As the mathematicians would say – that’s one hell of a step function. I think about that too.

Shout out here to B&W Photo Lab (http://bwphotolabs.com) in Portland for any and all black & white photo services. If you need film developed (or custom printing – any format – or old images restored), they’re fantastic.

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II: High Priestess

III: The Empress

IV: The Emperor

V: The Hierophant

VI: The Lovers

VII: The Chariot

VIII: Strength

IX: The Hermit

X: Wheel of Fortune

XI: Justice

XII: The Hanged Man

XIII: Death

XIV: Temperance

XV: The Devil

XVI: The Tower

XVII: The Star

XVIII: The Moon

XIX: The Sun

XX: Judgement

XXI: The World

And, of course, the Series all begins with the number that isn’t a number: